A frantic day of AI releases sharpened the industry’s new fault line: not just which model scores highest, but which gets close enough for far less money. Weighing OpenAI’s new Sol, Terra and Luna against Anthropic, xAI and Meta, the conversation argues that price-performance, not raw benchmark supremacy, may decide where people actually work AI into coding, finance and everyday software tasks.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri sketches a workplace where AI shrinks product teams, blurs job boundaries and makes taste, judgment and strategy more valuable than sheer execution. He also argues that an internet flooded with synthetic media may ultimately reward authenticity, even as Instagram struggles to label, rank and moderate what is real.

Nilay Patel and Peter Kafka treat Comcast’s breakup as the latest collapse of the old “content plus pipes” fantasy, tracing how a generation of telecom-media mergers failed to turn internet access into cable TV all over again. Their conversation follows the money from NBCUniversal and Versant to Peacock, sports rights, and broadband monopolies, asking what media companies can still own that the internet has not already commodified.

A wide-ranging AMA traces Gergely Orosz’s shift from Uber manager to independent publisher, then circles through AI hiring, code quality, startup culture and the engineers still finding leverage in a choppy market. Along the way, he argues that AI is less a doctrine than a tool, and that careers are future-proofed less by credentials than by proximity to relevant work.

A writer and technologist describes using AI as both intoxicant and tool, building bespoke software while guarding his mornings and attention so the work that matters does not get flattened into productivity theater. The conversation moves from vibe coding and the collapse of old SaaS moats to the stubborn value of weird books, deep focus and human particularity in an epochal technological shift.

Casey Newton tests Raycast’s Glaze by building a Nightwing-themed to-do list, a custom Platformer archive search tool, and a half-finished source tracker, using the experience to argue that AI-made software is getting more visual, more personal, and more immediately useful. The appeal is less technical novelty than the thrill of instantly reshaping the tools that used to make users live with their compromises.

A Gusto product leader traces how one company’s AI adoption moved from informal demos to quarterly hackathons, shared tooling and an expectation that everyone, not just engineers, learns to build. The conversation argues that sustained time, paired practice and connected data matter more than slogans if companies want AI fluency to change how work gets done.

At Cannes, two longtime UTA executives explain how influencer careers became full-scale media companies, built through strategy meetings, product launches, and careful management of platform risk. The conversation treats creators less as internet personalities than as entrepreneurs navigating algorithms, brand deals, physical goods, and the looming pressures of AI.

At Cannes, Digitas North America CEO Amy Lanzi argues that advertising’s AI boom resembles the overhyped promises of programmatic, with platforms selling automation while agencies and brands still need human judgment, strategy, and data fluency. The conversation also traces the rise of creators as full-fledged marketing businesses and the growing fight over who controls the relationship between brands, audiences, and the platforms in between.

Natalia, Every’s head of consulting, describes how AI agents are moving from novelty to everyday infrastructure: managing sales ops, triaging email, building family care systems, and turning research into personalized learning tools. The conversation also argues for a clearer division of labor, with human judgment and off-the-shelf software still essential even as custom agents absorb administrative work.

Charlie Warzel talks with writer John Paul Brammer about recovering a reading life in the age of feeds, alerts, and algorithmic distraction. Their conversation reframes the so-called attention crisis as a crisis of curiosity, arguing that books can restore stillness, deepen thought, and sharpen both writing and the sense of what feels genuinely human.

Paul Cobblestone traces Supabase’s rise from a side project and open-source Postgres toolkit into a foundational backend platform, shaped by product positioning, relentless shipping and a refusal to sacrifice developer trust for lock-in. The conversation also follows how remote culture, community-led growth and successive AI tailwinds turned a database company into infrastructure for millions of builders.

Ford CEO Jim Farley talks with Joanna Stern about the company’s risky effort to rebuild its electric-vehicle strategy around cheaper, simpler cars, while arguing that software, tariffs and Chinese competition are reshaping the entire auto business. The conversation widens into Farley’s view that America’s bigger crisis is not just EV profitability but a hollowed-out culture that undervalues factory, trade and emergency-service work.

Edwin Chen, the founder of data-labeling and evaluation firm Surge, describes training frontier models as a kind of schooling for AGI, where benchmarks now stretch from middle-school math to research-level discovery. The conversation widens into a debate over whether AI should optimize for human flourishing or the same engagement traps that warped social media, and what deeply personal data may be worth in teaching models taste, judgment, and voice.

Harvard Business School professor Linda Hill argues that innovation is less about lone brilliance than about building cultures, roles, and routines that let people co-create, experiment, and scale new ideas. She lays out why leaders must make space for others, bridge silos, and act more like wayfinders than visionaries with a fixed map.

A former Facebook executive revisits the company’s famous ethos of moving fast, arguing that its real aim was rapid learning rather than reckless breakage. The conversation traces how psychological safety, technical guardrails, and a founder’s temperament shape a culture that can scale without turning failure into blame.

At Cloaked, head of product Kyler describes how an internal AI “harness” evolved from a personal fix for prompt-copying drudgery into companywide infrastructure installed on every managed computer. The conversation traces a distinctly AI-native operating model, with Slack agents for nontechnical staff, coding agents for power users, and layered guardrails designed to make automation useful without making it reckless.

Patreon CEO Jack Conte says the company has outgrown its old role as a payments layer and is rebuilding itself as a discovery, hosting and community platform for creators squeezed by algorithmic feeds, Apple’s fees and AI-fueled slop. The conversation ranges from social media’s failures to the payment and moderation pressures of running a creator business that now competes more directly with Instagram, TikTok and Substack.

Anthropic engineering leader Fiona Fung describes a software world where code is abundant, initiative matters more than syntax, and managers rely on AI to track quality, feedback, and the work itself. The conversation traces how engineering, product management, and team culture are being remade by agents, even as loneliness, fear, and accountability become harder problems to solve.

Gary Shteyngart revisits the eerie prescience of Super Sad True Love Story and traces how a culture of ranking, optimization, and screen-mediated life has hollowed out intimacy and pleasure. The conversation turns toward beauty, craft, and conviviality as stubborn forms of resistance to a joyless, hyper-efficient age.